attempt "to make the worse appear the better reason."

His wisdom will be differently judged by those who condemn or approve
the chief acts of his policy. But it deserves to be noted that all the
legislation he passed, even the measures which, like the Irish Church
Disestablishment Bill, exposed him to angry attacks at the time, have
now been approved by the all but unanimous judgment of Englishmen.[69]
The same may be said of two acts which brought much invective upon
him--his settlement of the _Alabama_ claims, one of the wisest strokes
of foreign policy ever accomplished by a British minister, and his
protest against a support of the Turks in and after 1876. I pass by
Irish Home Rule, because the wisdom of the course he took must be
tested by results that are yet unborn, as I pass by his Egyptian
policy in 1882-85, because it cannot be fairly judged till the facts
have been fully made public. He may be open to blame for his
participation in the Crimean War, for his mistaken view of the
American Civil War, for his neglect of the Transvaal question when he
took office in 1880, and for his omission during his earlier career to
recognise the gravity of Irish disaffection and to study its causes. I
have heard him lament that he had not twenty years earlier given the
same attention to that abiding source of the difficulties of England
which he gave from 1866 onwards. If in these instances he erred, it
must be remembered that he erred in company with nine-tenths of
British statesmen in both political parties.

Their admiration did not prevent his friends from noting tendencies
which sometimes led him to miscalculate the forces he had to deal
with. Being, like the younger Pitt, extremely sanguine, he was prone
to underrate difficulties. Hopefulness is a splendid quality. It is
both the child and the parent of faith. Without it neither Mr. Pitt
nor Mr. Gladstone could have done what they did. But it disposes its
possessor not sufficiently to allow for the dulness or the prejudice
of others. So too the intensity of Mr. Gladstone's own feeling made
him fail to realise how many of his fellow-countrymen did not know of,
or were not shocked by, acts of cruelty and injustice which had roused
his indignation. If his hatred of ostentation suffered him to perceive
that a nation, however well assured of the reality of its power and
influence in the world, may also desire that this power and influence
should be asserted and proclaime